6 ways AI is making Email Marketing Smarter

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Paroma, aptly nicked ‘Alice in Wordland’ by her peers for her enthusiasm to explore the world of words, crafts compelling features around the fast-growing marketing technology space. As General Assignments Editor, she focuses on the vision of the key players in this industry even while highlighting the interesting side stories around martech companies. With over a decade of dabbling with various forms of writing and working closely with award-winning advertising agencies to launch premium brands in the Travel, Luxury and Real Estate space, she’s now keen to explore all the technology that helps put all this CX interface into place. A music and dance aficionado, Mademoiselle Paroma is as conversant with French as she is with numbers thanks to her five-year stint as an investment banker. She counts ‘Gone with the Wind’ as her fave rainy-day-cuppa-coffee read and ‘Into the Wild’ as the movie she can cozy up on her couch with.

Share your insights into martech happenings with Paroma on paroma.sen@martechadvisor.com

AI and machine learning capabilities are offered by many marketing automation platforms today to help marketers drive better targeting, relevance, and results.

In email marketing, AI-powered tools have the potential to change the game, as Andrea Wildt, CMO at Campaign Monitor said in a chat with us at the start of the year - from predicting the best type of content and the right send times to helping with more complex personalization. Furthermore, SendGrid's Chief Product Officer, Steve Sloan adds, "AI can inspire more authentic digital communication. AI is the key to unlocking a world where digital marketing feels much more like a real, human-to-human conversation. For all the advancements we have made in marketing technology, most digital communications still feel like bulk mail and billboards. Real conversations are tailored to each individual based on the specifics that we know about them - there hopes, needs and aspirations. That type of personalization doesn't scale well; it can't be done manually. We need digital communications to feel like human communications and also scale. Paradoxically AI the bridge that will help digital communications feel more human at broad scale."

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1. Faster and Better A/B Testing

A/B testing is not new. Email marketers (and marketers in general) have always performed tests to assess which variant of a particular campaign will work better for audiences. This testing relies on user data (behavior), as well as design and technology intuition to form hypotheses that help point marketers toward what would resonate most with their targets. Earlier, A/B testing was quite two-dimensional: you have two creatives and two groups, and you changed a few variants around each time. In today’s omnichannel world of hyper-targeting, this could add up to hundreds – even millions- of permutations and combinations. Difficult to track and impossible to arrive at any conclusion. What AI does is enhance the power of testing using customer data (behavior) to help you choose the campaign that will perform best- at scale and at much higher accuracy.

2. The Right Content

What kind of text will produce best results? Marketers have struggled to extract this answer while creating content. Several ESPs like Phrasee, Persado let AI determine what kind of subject lines, body text and CTA’s will make your recipients respond more.

Machine learning capabilities allow marketers to understand what resonates best with target audiences based on multiple of data points and variables. Based on this insight, these AI-powered platforms use natural language processing to create lines from scratch (subject lines, body copy and CTAs too) – all of these sound like they are written by humans and follow a consistent brand tone and language. Imagine the time and cost savings in addition to the improved email outcomes, not to mention all the data gathered on what worked and what didn’t, for increasingly smarter campaigns!

Are AI-generated lines any good?

As per Phrasee, AI-generated subject lines outperform human-written subject lines more than 95% of the time. Persado claims that its ‘cognitive content’ outperforms man-made content 100% of the time.

3. Optimizing Send Times

Send times can have a big impact on email opens and clicks. While email marketers are limited to segmenting send times based on time zones, AI can help ensure each customer (versus each segment) receives their mail at the time best suited to them, based on multiple factors including, but not limited, to time zones. AI-powered machine learning algorithms help email marketing managers send messages when users are more likely to open them based on their past behavior, and increasingly, based on real-time triggers. Each small tweak can add up to a substantial boost in conversions.

For eg. Adobe’s Sensei AI platform (and ML technology) can be used to personalize subject lines, personalize images and lots more on the email page

4. Smarter Personalization

The basic concept of personalization itself has evolved a lot from the days of name fields. With AI, true personalization can easily be a natural part of every campaign. There’s a lot AI can do in terms of hyper-personalized email marketing. McKinsey & Co. once estimated that Amazon generated 35 percent of its revenue from its AI-powered on-site and email product recommendations. AI algorithms skim past browsing behavior, on-site activity, and purchase history and use this data to create dynamic, real-time, personalized recommendations for every customer- at scale and at any frequency you want. This type of personalization offers as much value to the customer as it does to the marketer

Aside from product recommendations at a hyper-personalized level, AI can also personalize the images, the placement of various elements on the email and of course, call to action. The MarTech Advisor Newsdesk recently covered the launch of a conversational email marketing tool from Drift. It claims to make email marketing smarter, simpler and of course, more ‘conversational; Makes sense doesn’t it- use the power of AI to create a more human customer experience?!

5. Intelligent Segmentation

The basic segmentation benefits with AI are obvious. But with big data in the mix and increasing number of companies investing in CDPs or other customer data management platforms to develop a unified customer view, the ability of AI to take multiple variables and data points, and join the dots is better than ever. In email marketing systems that can draw directly from the unified customer data management platforms, AI can keep readjusting the segments and form new associations, based on multiple variables and responses, obviously with better response outcomes. This ability is being referred to as ‘dynamic predictive segmentation’.

6. AI-powered Data and Analytics to Predict and Act on Churn

Data powers all of the marketing today. We’ve talked about acquisition, but retention and upselling are no different. Email marketing is most effective to known, opted-in, existing customers. These customers expect the Brand to know them and serve them in a personalized way and modern marketing technology can address that. But AI can also track behavioral patterns to predict potential churn, the potential to improve value (with upselling and cross-selling offers) and potential to refer. Today, this technology is addressing everything from cart abandonment to minimizing churn by proactively identifying such customers and acting well on time with customized retention offers. Imagine the savings if all ‘reactivation’ could be replaced by retention!

Have you experienced the power of AI in your email marketing? In what way and how? Give us a shout on @martechadvisor or @paromasen! If you are, on the other hand, at the left end of the spectrum, then you cannot miss MarTech Advisor’s Email Marketing Buyers Guide. Designed to help small and medium-size marketers make a more informed email marketing tool choice, you can access it here with a single click.